


This is the way the year begins and ends

by melliyna



Category: Doctor Who, The West Wing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-18
Updated: 2009-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-04 14:10:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/31069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melliyna/pseuds/melliyna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was the year that never was, but Toby still remembers</p>
            </blockquote>





	This is the way the year begins and ends

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [](http://raedbard.livejournal.com/profile)[**raedbard**](http://raedbard.livejournal.com/)'s Toby and Sam ficathon. The prompt was based off _The Hollow Men_ by TS Eliot, more specifically the quote: _between the idea and the reality/between the motion and the act/falls the shadow_. A special thank you to [](http://avon7.livejournal.com/profile)[**avon7**](http://avon7.livejournal.com/) for reading this (even though it isn't her thing) and just being a constant source of encouragement in general. Any remaining mistakes are my own.

**Title:** This is the way the year begins and ends  
**Author:** [](http://melliyna.livejournal.com/profile)[**melliyna**](http://melliyna.livejournal.com/)  
**Fandom:** The West Wing (with a dash of Doctor Who verse)  
**Pairing:** Toby/Sam  
**Rating:** R  
**Disclaimer:** Aaron Sorkin's, not mine without a doubt  
**Spoilers:** No explicit spoilers but some very vague ones for Doctor Who S3  
**Word Count:** 1,000 words   
**Notes:** Written for [](http://raedbard.livejournal.com/profile)[**raedbard**](http://raedbard.livejournal.com/)'s Toby and Sam ficathon. The prompt was based off _The Hollow Men_ by TS Eliot, more specifically the quote: _between the idea and the reality/between the motion and the act/falls the shadow_. A special thank you to [](http://avon7.livejournal.com/profile)[**avon7**](http://avon7.livejournal.com/) for reading this (even though it isn't her thing) and just being a constant source of encouragement in general. Any remaining mistakes are my own.   
**Summary:** It was the year that never was, but Toby still remembers

Toby knows he is wasting the ice, particularly in this heat. But there is something addictive about it, the way Sam flinches slightly as he trails one across his chest, arching in to the cool lines it leaves as the ice melts. It is almost like the year, the way it rose and fell so beautifully and then melted away, leaving nothing substantial visible. But Toby knows, or at least likes to think he knows - that the patterns have left marks.

He knows that he has Sam, in every way that matters. It becomes a mantra that he repeats to himself against the times when Sam just smiles at him - a friendly smile, with overtones of potential. But it is not the smile of Sam the lover, who arched in to his hands and his body and sweated with him, in that tiny little house. They'd fixed it up together, learning as they go to fix things. He looks at himself, wishing he could see the scars, the signs of work that should have been there. Stubbornly, they remain smooth and untouched. And Sam smiles, but it is not the same.

The roof had been falling apart when they'd stumbled across the place, covered in dust and smelling of sweat and long days of running, fruitlessly fleeing the destruction and the deaths they could not prevent. Yet, somehow they had escaped. Sam had found pieces of the roof scattered across the ground, had handed them to Toby, who had fixed the bigger holes as best he could. Toby thought he'd done well at that, the fixing of the roof. Sam too had learnt away his clumsiness, in those early days.

Time goes by easily enough, without the constant of watches or routinue. He fixes, patches things up and Sam scavenges through the house, turning up things that may be of use - saucepans, kettles, stored blankets, candles. There is even books, not yet taken over by the weather and piles of blank paper journals, which he remembers Sam giving to him with a smile, a smile that spoke of something else. He had rumpled his clothes, bunching his shirt in his fingers and kissed him, bruisingly, hand twined in Sam's hair, pushed him down in to the sheets and captured him there, against the rough white.

Both of them fell in to it then, the little world they had built up amongst the ruins. Sam would write, smiling and wrapped in Toby's blankets with a notepad against his knees. And Toby, thought this was perhaps the sexiest, most wonderful thing about Sam - this man who could write and smile at the world. It's not that you don't care, Sam had said to Toby once; it's just that you see more than I do the fall of the shadow. And Toby grins, grabs him again and tells him to stop using Eliot as a metaphorical prop. He can't stop tugging, even in bed.

They learn to grow food, sheltering its growth against the dust clouds. And once again, Toby sits in his office, his well appointed office and wonders that Sam does not remember, the way he mapped and marked the curves of his body, that he lay in Toby's bed and quoted Eliot. But of course, Toby knows he doesn't, cannot. Sam loves him, in the year that is, but not in the way of lovers. He traces the shapes of the words in his mind, the words they spoke and wrote together and tries to say that it is enough, that he remembers.

It was summer, when Martha Jones came out of the trees, brimming with the burden and hope of the world outside. She talked to them, long in to the night - watching the fire slowly burn down in to embers. It was a story, but she told it well, Toby thinks. The story of the Doctor, whom he remembers seeing in the television broadcast, an old man but yet young too, somehow. They listen to her, feed her and give her a place to sleep - then Martha flits out, tired but strong. Toby wonders if she will remember this, if she succeeds and whether she would want to when the world turns back to what it was. He is not sure, in the end if he does either.


End file.
